Peer Hull Kristensen & Maja Lotz publish a chapter in Riain, Behling, Ciccia and Flaherty (eds): The Changing Worlds and Workplaces of Capitalism.

Multinationals Of Industrial Co-Development: Co-Creating New Institutions Of Economic Development

How do the large scale structures of capitalism and the local social relations of workplaces and organisations shape each other? Through a series of European studies of capital and labour's shifting struggles and compromises; of the politics of welfare, industrial relations and labor markets; and the transformation of post-industrial networked workplaces, this edited collection shows how capitalist workplaces and economies are changing today.

Kristensen and Lotz’s analysis in Chapter 9 examines the organizational experimentations involved in coordinating and constituting genuinely transnational production, producing forms of economic integration that are deeper and more socially transformative than international trade and exchange. In the process, they reveal fundamental differences between these emergent organisational forms and the welfarist employers of fordist analysis. Many analyses of political economy assume a relatively standardized model of the firm and of production as well as the embeddedness of those processes in national level institutions. This chapter disrupts this assumption by investigating the interactions by which collaborative work arrangements and polyarchies of organization members (from diverse levels and groupings) in multinational firms are formed to come up with joint creative responses and innovations to challenges of the global economy. It shows how organization members co-create in innovative ways by coordinating work in highly non-hierarchical collaborative settings that cut across global divides and transgress traditional team structures – new ‘network organisation’ structures are linked inextricably with transformations in work itself. Simultaneously, new distributed management practices and roles are being created to support these highly interconnected global work arrangements. However, the new organizations largely prove either unable to generate the capabilities or unwilling to relinquish control to the degree necessary to develop the new forms fully."

Kristensen, Peer Hull & Maja Lotz: “Multinationals Of Industrial Co-Development: Co-Creating New Institutions Of Economic Development”, pp xx in Seán Ó Riain, Felix Behling, Rossella Ciccia and Eoin Flaherty (eds) 2015: The Changing Worlds and Workplaces of Capitalism, Macmillan Publishers 2015, ISBN 9781137427090